NASA insists it will be a near miss and nothing more, with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth.
The space agency said on Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid would make its closest approach on Friday at 11:27am AEDT, zooming past about 3,600 kilometres above the southern tip of South America.Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.
NASA's impact-hazard-assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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